I am in the market for the new top end 15 inch macbook pro, I was wondering how much of a speed increase would I see overall. I would like to play world of warcraft, will I see a performance boost from a ssd? Thanks.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)
The only thing an SSD does is allow you to read data from your drive faster (generally much faster than a standard hard drive). Once your game is loaded up, it's all up to the processor and graphics card. An SSD can certainly make your system feel much more snappy. But, it doesn't give you any more power in terms of running your games or applications. Having said that... the top end 15" MacBook Pro that you are looking at has more than enough power to handle WOW (with or without an SSD).
JoeyR is correct, the performance of a SSD drive is only on reads and writes
If you constantly exceed your RAM allocation, the pagination of excess memory needs to storage will be faster as well.
However a 7,200 RPM boot drive is pretty fast as well, at a lot lower $$ per GB than SSD and in a lot larger storage options.
7,200 RPM drives tend to use a bit more battery life than 5,400 RPM or SSD drives, if your on power most of the time then it's really not a issue.
Due to their limited writes, SSD drives are NOT being throughly erased using software designed for such purposes like on hard drives (Disk Utility), so any confidential information, sites visited, images and so forth can be recovered off of SSD drives.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/02/17/1911217/Confidential-Data-Not-Safe-O n-Solid-State-Disks
Thanks for both responses, but how much of a battery decrease will a 7200 rpm drive have compared to the 5400?
Anything substantial or noticeable?
Most people see a negligble difference. The faster spinning drive will use a tiny bit more power... but... since it transfers data faster, it doesn't need to spin at full speed as long as a 5400RPM drive. The two nearly cancel each other out. The difference is small enough that I wouldn't base my decision on which to get on any impact it might have on battery life.... you're looking at no more than a few minutes... which could just as easily be accounted for by watching a few extra flash videos or other processor intensive applications.
How much of a speed increase does a ssd give to a 2011 15 inch macbook pro
